Doing a bespoke design
December 10, 2005 | Leave a Comment |
After some investigations we found out that none of the SkyeHomes standard designs would be a suitable fit for us: either their design was not allowed within the planning constraints of our plot or we did not like the design. So, we decided to go with a bespoke design.A bespoke design means you have to hire an architect and they generally don’t come cheap. The fee for an architect tends to be something between 7% and 15% of the buildcost…
SkyeHomes then pointed out the possibility of doing a bespoke design for us. Their deal is fairly simple: you pay a limited sum for the house design and they retain the copyrights of the design and add your housedesign to their portfolio. An elegant win-win situation, so we agreed…
So, this limited sum… what is it. Well, that part of the deal becomes clear as you move along in the design process. We had to pay the following cost:
- Bespoke design fee and preparation of planning drawings. You pay £500 of this as an engagement fee to SkyeHomes.
- Provisions of Building warrant drawings, SAP calculations and Engineer’s Certificate. This amount depends on the actual size of your house, so the bigger the house, the higher the amount.
- Work carried out by the SkyeHomes house designer for preparing and submitting plans and drawings to the Highland Council for detailed planning permission and building warrant.
The complete bespoke design cost us a little bit over £5,000 excluding VAT. An architect would have cost us at least twice that amount. This is in our opinion a very good deal… and SkyeHomes can add another nice design to their portfolio.
While talking to SkyeHomes we researched other suppliers of timber frame kits in the UK and found out that SkyeHomes was a bit more expensive in their kit pricing (you can easily compare them by doing a cost/sqm comparison).
However if you talk to other suppliers - we talked to Potton - and tell them that you’re planning for a house on Skye, things get a bit awkward. We got the feeling from two extensive phonecalls with them, that they’re not particulary keen on working all the way up north and that they’re not too familiar with the local way of business. It was our estimate that - in the end - our project would not be significantly cheaper.
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